Sometimes you find pieces of yourself in the strangest places.
For me, it was in the swirling pink and red chaos of Him from The Powerpuff Girls, a character who defied every gender norm a cartoon could throw at us. There was something magnetic about this flamboyant, powerful being who existed entirely on their own terms, unconcerned with fitting into anyone else's boxes.
As a queer kid in a tiny Southern town, where conformity wasn't just expected but demanded, finding characters like Him felt like discovering hidden messages meant just for me. Here was someone who embraced their strangeness, who drew power from the very things that made others uncomfortable. In a world of binary choices and rigid expectations, Him was gloriously, unapologetically neither - and both.
This connection to horror's outsiders wasn't limited to cartoons. The Creature from the Black Lagoon spoke to something deeper in me. Here was a being capable of profound love, yet feared and hunted simply for existing. The Creature didn't try to become human to be worthy of love. It remained itself, even when that meant facing rejection and violence.
Being different in a place that valued blind faith above all meant learning early that difference was dangerous. And I was very different. It wasn't just about being queer in a place that condemned queerness. It was about being a free thinker in a world where having conversations about critical thinking or exploring ideas through fantasy was seen as threatening to rigid religious dogma. Parents viewed me as dangerous; a corrupting influence on their children. I was the monster—the blue-haired woke liberal—they warned their kids about before we even had the language of online culture wars.
The isolation was intense. But like many queer kids before me, I found my small group of fellow outcasts. Looking back, it's almost funny - but not surprising - that most of them would also come out as queer later in life. We recognized each other before we even understood ourselves. Like the monsters in Anne Rice's novels, we created our own little family of misfits.
The "love the sinner, hate the sin" crowd was almost worse than the outright hostile ones. There's something particularly crushing about being told you're loved while simultaneously being treated as something broken that needs fixing. It's the kind of psychological horror that no monster movie can quite capture.
Horror became my refuge, not despite its darkness but because of it. In horror stories, the monster's perspective matters. The creature's pain is given weight and meaning. Even when the monster dies in the end, their existence has power. They change things simply by being. And sometimes, the monster survives, finds others like them, builds something new.
This wasn't just about seeing myself in villains or monsters.
It was about finding stories that dared to suggest that the real horror often lies in rigid normality, in the cruelty of conformity, in the violence of forced assimilation. Every story about a misunderstood creature, every tale of an outsider finding their power, helped me survive in a world that seemed determined to either change me or cast me out.
Horror taught me that being cast as the monster in someone else's story doesn't make you evil. Sometimes it just means you're living your truth in a world that isn't ready for it. Every time I encountered a character who embraced their difference, who found power in their uniqueness instead of shame, it was like finding another piece of a map leading to self-acceptance.
The beauty of horror is that it doesn't require happy endings to be deeply, powerfully validating. It acknowledges that sometimes the world is cruel, that sometimes the mob comes with pitchforks, that sometimes the monster must retreat to the shadows. But it also shows us that surviving is its own kind of victory. That finding your people, even if society labels them monsters too, is sacred.
Looking back at those early connections with horror's outsiders, I understand now that I wasn't just seeing myself in these characters. I was learning from them. Learning that it's possible to survive being cast as the villain in your small town's story. Learning that being feared doesn't mean being wrong. Learning that sometimes the family you need isn't the one you're born into, but the one you find or create.
As we explored in the previous piece, horror has always provided space for queer stories, coding them into monsters and villains when they couldn't be told openly. But experiencing this personally, finding these stories when I desperately needed them, showed me why this matters beyond literary analysis or film theory. These weren't just stories - they were survival guides.
The world has changed since then.
We have more open representation, more diverse stories being told. But those old monsters, those classic outsiders? They still matter. They remind us where we came from, how we survived, and why we must keep telling stories about the beautiful strangeness of being exactly who you are.
Because sometimes the most powerful thing a monster can do is refuse to stop existing.
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